Health IT Playbook Updates

The ONC Health IT Playbook has been updated to include the newly revised guides and training modules.

The ONC’s Health IT Playbook is an online resource for health IT professionals that offers help selecting technology, sharing health information securely, aligning health IT with quality measures, and even finding technical support.

Radiologists continue to lead the charge to 3D printing

Dr. Adnan Sheikh is Associate
Professor at the University of
Ottawa, where he is Medical
Director for 3D printing

PARCA eNews – Jan. 30, 2017 – Many surgeons and other specialists have recognized the incredible potential of 3D printing. Using 3D printers, patient data is essentially turned into actionable, physical objects. The applications are numerous ranging from individualized prosthetics, to surgical models for preoperative planning, to anatomical replacement implants. At last year’s American College of Radiology annual meeting, a team of radiologists presented a paper showing how 3D printing could become a new service of the radiology department. At this year’s Radiology Society of North America (RSNA) annual meeting, 3D printing was one of the hottest topics with several presentations and workshops, culminating in the establishment of the RSNA 3D Special Interest Group. One of the organizers of the 3D printing area at RSNA was Dr. Adnan Sheikh, Medical Director for 3D Printing at the University of Ottawa, one of a handful of institutions that have already established 3D printing services.

DICOM committee looks to extend standards to 3D printing

Many 3D printed medical models
were on display at RSNA 2016

There were more than 40 presentations pertaining to 3D printing at the RNSA 2016 annual meeting held in Chicago last November, among them was a discussion at the DICOM committee meeting attended by PARCA advisory board member Herman Oosterwijk. Among the issues 3D printing presents to the PACS administrators community is a lack of standards for the additional metadata to the print file to allow it to be managed in the PACS.

The risk is that the 3D printing medical imaging standards void will be filled with a variety of work-around solutions that will separate imaging-derived data from the patient’s imaging record. To address this risk, Oosterwijk reports that a DICOM working group has been resurrected to specifically extend and promote the use of DICOM for the creation, storage and management of 3D printing models.

Which PACS administrator certification is best for South Africa?

Clive Daniell, Independent PACS-
RIS consultant

For independent PACS/RIS consultant and In2PACS co-founder Clive Daniell the answer was the PARCA Certified PACS Associates (CPAS) exam, which he chose over other options for several reasons. 

In2PACS is the leading consultancy and training organization in South Africa. In a LinkedIn post, Daniell listed his reasons and what he learned by taking, or "writing" the exam as they apparently say in South Africa.

"In the future I intend writing the other certifications," Daniell concluded. "I have a feeling the level of knowledge and exam will be more intense, but this would be appropriate as an advanced PACS administrator certification."

To read the full post, click here.

HHS lights FHIR with interoperable medication lists to consumers

The agency also announced a new challenge to create tools to generate user-friendly “snapshot” of model privacy practices for digital health products

PARCA eNews – Jan. 30, 2017 – The Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) in December, in partnership with leaders in the private sector, as well as patient and consumer advocates, coordinated a live demonstration of consumer-friendly applications (apps) that import data from some of the largest health information technology (IT) vendors in the country to allow individuals to access a consolidated list of their medications from a variety of sources in one place. 

Lack of timely breach notification costs Presence Health $475,000

First HIPAA enforcement action for slow notification

PARCA eNews – Jan. 30, 2017 – Presence Health has agreed to settle potential violations of the HIPAA Breach Notification Rule by paying $475,000 and implementing a corrective action plan. 

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office for Civil Rights (OCR), Jan. 9 2017, announced the first Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) settlement based on the untimely reporting of a breach of unsecured protected health information (PHI). 

Healthcare data breaches up but number of records breached slashed

PARCA eNews – Jan. 30, 2017 – The total number of healthcare records breached in 2016 were more than 16.5 million was down substantially from the 113 million records breached in 2015, but the 324 breaches of 500 or more records reported by healthcare organizations was higher than in any other year since the Office of Civil Rights started publishing breach summaries in 2009. 

Registration for SIIM 2017 Annual Meeting opens

PARCA eNews – Jan. 30, 2017 – Registration for SIIM 2017 in Pittsburgh, PA, June 1-3, 2017 is now open. SIIM is one of the top conferences for imaging informatics professionals and covers the latest cutting-edge technology for enterprise imaging education.

Robust growth expected in European PACS market

The global market for PACS is expected to continue to grow by 6.2 percent in terms of revenue, according to Persistence Market Research, which published its report online Jan. 18, 2017.

While the North American market will continue dominate with 31 percent of the value share, increasing demand for PACS from hospitals, diagnostic centers and imaging centers in Western Europe, especially in the EU5, is expected to fuel a 6.0 percent compounded annual growth rate projected out to 2026.

Integrating smartphone imaging into a multi-modal, multi-organizational PACS

Gary Wendt, MD, MBA

Gary J. Wendt, M.D., MBA, is a Professor of Radiology, and Enterprise Director of Medical Imaging and Vice Chair of Informatics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has more than 20 years experience in electrical and computer engineering, business, internal medicine and radiology. Dr. Wendt began his career as a computer scientist where he wrote several copyrighted applications for large commercial institutions. A frequent speaker at conferences, he spoke at the SIIM Wisconsin Regional Meeting last October. He outlined the UW Medicine experience in implementing a multi-organizational, multi-modality PACS. As part of that project Dr. Wendt and his colleague at UW, Dr. Richard Bruce, spun off a company to develop a software system called ImageMoverMD that makes it easy for physicians and other providers to upload images captured from mobile devices to a PACS that is DICOM compatible and feeds into to the patient’s EMR.